What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive Eating is an approach to nutrition that has become much more well known among health care professionals in recent years.

It’s a non-diet approach to health that aims to foster healthy relationships with food and break cycles of chronic dieting. Intuitive Eating has a health behavior focus rather than using restrictive rules to guide food choices.

A huge component of Intuitive Eating is that it involves listening to the body’s internal wisdom. A few important things to note about Intuitive Eating: Intuitive Eating is not a diet. Rejecting diet culture and having unconditional permission to eat without guilt is the foundation of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is about trusting our bodies and allowing ourselves to let our body guide us in nutrition without judgement.

We are all born to eat Intuitively. Infants come into the world listening to their internal hunger/fullness cues and cravings to decide how to make food decisions. Children innately eat when hungry and stop when full as well as balance their nutritional needs from week to week. As we grow up, we often become more dictated by rules, regulations, and schedules around food which disconnects our mind and body.

Intuitive Eating does not translate to “eat whatever you want”. Intuitive eating comes from a truly holistic health standpoint, that looks at all the different factors that contribute to health including sleep, social connections, physical health, mental health, chronic disease or disease risk, socioeconomic status, stigma, and biases as well as taste and preferences. It takes into consideration our unique nutrition needs and honors health, but also doesn’t deprive anyone of the joy and pleasure that can come from food.

There are 10 principles of Intuitive Eating, and we are so excited to share them in the next upcoming weeks.